In dental medicine, many treatment materials are typically placed within the oral cavity on the hard (teeth) tissues and soft (inner mucosal epithelium of the cheek, lips, and gingiva and the tongue) tissues.
These treatment materials are placed topically on these tissues or may be inserted (injected) in the space between them, for example, in the naturally occurring sulcus at the tooth/gum line.
These treatment materials are typically applied to the tissues in an “open” manner, namely, without any covering material or containment device. This significantly reduces their desired therapeutic effect as the materials are immediately exposed to saliva contamination (containing numerous pathogenic microorganisms) and salivary washout (or fluid/solids ingestion washout) in a very short time. This time range can be as short as a few seconds to around 10 minutes or more, depending on salivary flow, the viscosity of the treatment material or whether the patient ingests solids or liquids after application of the treatment material.
Additionally, currently known devices use a cover device that covers both the teeth and the gums. These are typically custom made to a specific patient using the following fabrication method. Dental molds are taken of the patient's teeth and surrounding gums and dental stone cast models are poured and allowed to harden. These cast models are removed from the molds and a vacuum-formed thin plastic custom made tray for that specific patient is formed and trimmed to cover over both the teeth and a narrow portion of the surrounding gums. These typically leak the treatment material out of them and also allow saliva to seep inside of them as the stiff material of the tray is difficult to adapt closely to the undulating and varied topography of the teeth and surrounding gums of each individual patient which they are meant to cover. As these devices also cover the teeth, they generally do not allow the patient to eat or speak properly when they are inserted intraorally.
Additionally, patches onto whose inner surface a thin layer of treatment material has been adhered are used to cover small areas of the gum tissue. Due to their size they can only treat very limited areas of the soft tissues of the oral cavity and cannot be used to treat the teeth as they cannot be adhered to the teeth structure. They are also easily dislodged by the tongue or contact with the inner cheek and lip muscles.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an improved device that aims to overcome or at least alleviate the above mentioned drawbacks.